Wishful Dreaming

Dreams were a frequent mode of divine messages in the Bible, which has always fascinated me, particularly because most of my dreams have a sort of "Dr. Seuss meets Salvador Dali" quality to them.  Here's a sample:  a friend was in trouble; suddenly he became a raw hamburger patty and I carried him around in my apron pocket to keep him safe.  Somehow I doubt that there's any sort of grand spiritual message in there.   When I was very young, I used to try to program my dreams.  In an avant garde pseudo-science kind of way, I thought perhaps that if I thought REALLY HARD about circuses (for example) before going to sleep, this would naturally produce dreams about circuses.  It never worked.

Two nights ago, my sister appeared in a dream.  After she died in 1987, dream appearances were common, but they come much less frequently now.  Less than a year after she died, I saw her (as it were) walking across the green grass on the corner of our church property.  She was radiant with health and possessed an other-worldly loveliness.  I ran to her and hugged her - so happy!  She remained in my arms for only a moment and then backed away.  "Can't you stay?"  I pleaded.  She shook her head, smiled, and left.   Two nights ago, I saw her again.  She looked just like I remember her, permanently frozen at 33 years of age (and yet always older than me, though I am now 53).   Again, I hugged her.  I kissed her cheek and said, "I love you."  And then she was gone.  I do miss her...

God is done with special revelation - it's all in His Book -  so I'm not going to wake up some day and say, "The Lord told me to put a raw hamburger patty in my apron pocket!"   However, God is sovereign over all things and this must include our dreams, as random as they sometime seem.  It makes sense to me that He can use our dreams to illumine things for us, using heavenly wisdom to weave something meaningful into the strange flotsam and jetsam of our subconscious.   So I don't immediately discard my dreams as mental rubbish, but neither do I count them as a promise of some sort of future reality.  Like everything else they must be examined in the light of Scripture.   God holds all the deep and secret things in His hand.

"He reveals deep and secret things; 

He knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with Him.

Daniel 2:22